Summary

It's a new dawn for China's space scientists. Over the next several years, China plans to launch five scientific space missions, including a dark-matter probe and an attempt at long-distance quantum communication. Four more innovative missions are in the design stage, Science has learned: an x-ray telescope to study black holes, a solar imager that would swing high above and far below the line of sight between Earth and the sun, a space-based very-long-baseline interferometer tuned to long-millimeter wavelengths, and a four-satellite cluster to study coupling of the magnetosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere. Scientific payloads are being assembled for Tiangong 1 and for two more Tiangong modules, including a crewed space laboratory, which China plans to launch in the next 3 years. And scientists are designing experiments for the future space station.